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DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Federico Fellini's last real masterpiece was also his most deeply personal, and in some ways most deeply conflicted film. There is a sweet nostalgia in the memories of his youth, presented here in this year-in-the-life portrait of a seaside Italian town much like Rimini, where the director grew up. But that upbringing was also in 1930s Italy, when Mussolini's fascism not only held the country in its grip, but also enjoyed the wildly popular support of the people. As light-hearted and hilarious as much of Amarcord is, the undercurrent of the complicity of these simple people in such dark deeds is never far from the surface. While it's easy to write off the more puerile aspects of the film to the fact that its point of view is that of Fellini as a teenage boy, all the fart jokes, leering at big-bottomed peasant-women, and comically stereotyped school authority figures are sharp criticisms of what the director saw as a perpetual state of moral adolescence that allowed Mussolini to prosper.
Fellini isn't so interested in plot as he is in portraiture here, using episodes in a varying cast of characters from the town, in both reality and fantasy, to present a fantastically nuanced picture of a particular place and time. Woven throughout is the involvement and coming of age of Titta, the stand-in for the younger Fellini. Amarcord contains so many little stories and anecdotes and dreams that it can become overwhelming at times; luckily, the film is gorgeous enough that you can just switch off and enjoy the sights for a few minutes until you catch your breath. Many of the images here are some of the most unforgettable in all of film: the "puffballs" of spring floating over Titta as he stands out on a lonely quay; the villagers sitting out on the Adriatic in the dead of night on rowboats waiting for the passage of a great ocean liner; and most achingly beautiful of all, a peacock lighting on a fountain and spreading its tailfeathers in the midst of a heavy snow. An opportunity to see this on a big screen is not to be missed.
View the trailer.
A brand new 35mm print opens tomorrow at E Street for one week only.
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Crips and Bloods: Made in America
Stacy Peralta is no stranger to documentaries about youth-centric subcultures. But the board-riding subjects of his previous docs, the excellent Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants, seem fairly innocuous in comparison to his latest, which examines Los Angeles's two most infamous gangs. But what typified Peralta's skateboarding and surfing movies is his meticulous research into the genesis of these cultures. Not just a surface look at how they operate and what they're about, but a finely tuned investigation of why they came into being. It's this sensibility that he brings to the far more serious subject of how these gangs arose and came to be in such a bloody rivalry, as he tries to make some sense out of years of senseless violence.
View the trailer.
At the AFI on Sunday at 1 p.m. and Monday at 8:45 p.m.
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DC Environmental Film Festival (continued)
We talked last week about the opening of the D.C. Environmental Film Festival. It's now in full swing, and has plenty to offer in the coming week. The AFI is putting their Paul Newman retrospective on temporary hold for the next few days to host the festival's Herzog collection, which will show 11 films by the director — narrative, documentary, and short — between Friday and Wednesday. Other highlights include a five-hour series of ocean films on Saturday at the Natural History Museum, including the world premiere of A Sea Change (pictured), a documentary about the threats presented by ocean acidification, and featuring a Q&A with director Barbara Ettinger after the screening. And at the Phillips collection on Saturday, the gallery ties together its month-long Italian film series with the Environmental Film Festival with two films, Cows are Nice and Mr. Bené Goes to Italy, that examine the impact of the food industry on agriculture and farming communities.
The DCEFF started earlier this week and goes through March 22 and dozens of venues around town. See the schedule for details.
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Robert Blecker is a death penalty advocate. Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. He's a death penalty enthusiast. Notions of justice are secondary to Blecker, who's really out for retribution, and is unapologetic about his crusade. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he strikes up an uncomfortable, sometimes adversarial friendship with Daryl Holton, a death row inmate on the fast-track to execution after the killing of his four children, a crime for which Holton turned himself in and for which freely admits he deserves to die. Holton is the titular "me" of course, and he and Blecker spend a lot of time talking about crime and punishment and developing a relationship that challenges Blecker's viewpoints in real and complex ways. Where he ends up is immaterial; a character study of a person on either extreme side of any contentious issue playing out an internal debate has the potential to be riveting cinema on its own.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
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E Street has reintroduced its midnight movie series, and frankly, we're underwhelmed at the programming, which is why we haven't mentioned it previously. Fight Club and Ghostbusters might be great movies, but they're not midnight movie material. And half of the titles between now and the end of April are Star Trek movies? Who's idea was that? Where's the kitsch? Where's the cult? Midnight movies are for gratuitous low budget blood, sex, and violence, and E Street's programmers are savvy enough film fans to know that, so I say shame on them for taking the safe route. That said, they do have one legitimate midnight movie classic on the schedule, and while I think Rocky Horror is more than a little played out at this point, I know there are plenty of people who still love to don their finest fishnets, garters, and leather bustiers for an evening of time warping.
View the trailer.
E Street is your place Friday and Saturday at midnight, as well as next month on April 10 and 11.
Of course, the one organization in town that does program films that perfectly fit the midnight movie mold does all their screenings on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. That would be Washington Psychotronic Film Society, and as we mentioned earlier this week, they're celebrating their return on Tuesday at their new venue, The Warehouse, with a screening of the 1977 spoof film American Raspberries.
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"and frankly, we're underwhelmed at the programming"
I said the same thing when I read their list. Visions
Bistro suffered the same fate with Playing the Donny Darko film over and over again. The E st crew would do better to let the Psychotronic Film Society book their future Midnight Shows. I'd gladly pay my $10 to see
"Meet the Feebles" or "I Spit on Your Grave".
I wouldn't because I could get those for free. But $10 to see hot chicks dressed strangely AND rocky horror in a way that is only masturbation if you watch it at home? I am so there. Except I'd probably laze out and go to the George Mason one.
Kitsch and cult are Star Trek in spades, plus, there's a new Star Trek movie coming out?
Yes, unfortunately.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture has zero kitsch value, at least on the campy side of things. It takes itself way to seriously for that. Though it may have the most traditionally cultish following, since it carves out its own little niche in the ST fanbase, being nothing like either the series that preceded it or the movies that followed it in tone.
I'll give you Khan; Kirk screaming to the heavens is reason enough. It's still not midnight movie material, though.
And Search for Spock is way too sentimental for this kind of venue. Though McCoy acting like Spock is certainly good for some laughs.
And even if they were good midnight movies, showing them as a tie-in to a big-budget summer blockbuster would immediatley negate that fact. It's just not in the midnight movie spirit.
A cult movie may have a rabidly dedicated following, but to my mind, that following has to be relatively small, otherwise, it's just a big mass of fans. Star Trek has a cult, but is too ingrained in the mainstream beyond just the Trekkies to be cult.
I'm not knocking Star Trek — I'm geek enough that I'll be there opening weekend for the new one — but they're just not midnight movie materal. B-movies, low-budget genre pics, grindhouse, and cinematic freakshows and oddities. That's what that timeslot is for, and it's something this city is sorely missing. When a series like this is the only thing we can do as a city at having a midnight movie series, it just serves as ammunition to out of towners who have us pegged as a bunch of squares. We can do better.
You'd figure with a money pit like the Lincoln Theater that's open for, what, twenty minutes every other month, and the Howard Theater up for renovation, they'd have at least one decent place in this jerkwater burg to do midnight movies. Instead we get twelve screens of the same dumbed-down slop you can find in any suburban cinema googleplex, complete with cellphoning idiots and stanky people who mistake cologne for actually wiping your a$$, and $15 buckets of stale popcorn. F**k that noise with a white hot stick.
Yeah, we can do better. Best purchase I ever made was getting a 120" front projector. Between Video Vault, the torrents, and my terabytes of shaved amputee panda snuff, I have no reason to leave my basement except to strangle hobos.
I think they should do more traditional midnight fare, but mixing in a few classics like Goonies, Dark Crystal, or Fight Club once-in-awhile.